DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS, Proctor's Theatre, 02/26/2008

SCHENECTADY â€¦ Snow certainly kept a few less hardy souls away from Proctors on Tuesday night. No big loss for them, as opening night of Jeffrey Lane and David Yazbek’s “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” was a letdown.

This touring production again falls prey to having a cast too green for its own good.

In a show with this much riffing on Broadway tradition, one needs to have a little experience to get the jokes, much less deliver them.

“Scoundrels” is the musical based on the Steve Martin/Michael Caine film of the same name, and while the bones of the story are there, Lane’s book and Yazbek’s songs, which wink and wink and wink, take everything to a different level.

Different doesn’t mean higher. Lane and Yazbek seem for all the world like two frat boys trying to impress each other. There’s plenty of base humor laced into “Scoundrels,” and no chance for a pun is passed up.

In some ways, it even seems like “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” They both are send-ups of classic movie musicals, but the big difference is that Lane and Yazbek still have to stick to the framework of “Scoundrels.”

That framework is simple. Two con men, Lawrence Jameson (Jamie Jackson) and Freddy Benson(Doug Thompson), meet on the Riviera and bet each other they can score $50,000 from the newest game in town, soap heiress Christine Colgate (Jenny Gulley).

The framework also isn’t that simple, as there are twists and turns aplenty.

Jackson is very, very good as Jameson (even when singing the treacly, out-of-place ballad ”Love Sneaks In”). Would that the rest of the cast were up to his level.

Jeff Essex, as his “bodyguard” Andre, comes close, but no one else even gets within swinging distance.